Windy City Heat

(Paramount Home Entertainment, 9.26.2006)

Prepare for an onslaught of hype like few you've ever read before, for Windy City Heat is the kind of movie that DVD reviewers dream about: that little oddity that comes out of nowhere and blows your mind. To put it simply, this is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. Period. I don't expect this to become the consensus view -- this is one deeply surreal, disturbing, and peculiar documentary -- but those who appreciate this kind of absurdist, reality-based humour (it brings me back to one of my most notorious guilty pleasures, The Jamie Kennedy Experiment) are likely to eat this up... repeatedly. I know I will.

Before I get to the details of this one-of-a-kind bizarro masterpiece, I have a piece of half-hearted advice: if you want your experience with this movie to be as fresh and unexpected as mine, leave now and return after you've seen Windy City Heat. If you're still not sold, keep reading. The story is simple: an utterly clueless, but semi-endearing aspiring actor named Perry Caravello (aka "Scary Perry") -- who combines all the worst characteristics of Andrew "Dice" Clay, Gene Simmons, Steven Seagal, Brett "The Hitman" Hart, and another professional wrestling legend Fred Blassie (who exhibited roughly the same personality in the like-minded Andy Kaufman film, My Breakfast with Blassie) -- gets a chance to audition for Windy City Heat, a generic Hollywood production that has already auditioned and dismissed everyone from John Stamos and Harrison Ford to Brad Pitt and Robert De Niro. After a grueling, seemingly disastrous audition, Perry gets the role.

But Perry is in the dark about one thing that is common knowledge to everyone else: Windy City Heat is not a real movie, it's a prank production designed by Perry's "best friends" Don and Mole (with his obviously fake wig, Mole is the JT LeRoy of comedy hoaxes). Every situation and person Perry comes into contact with is designed to milk maximum frustration and disbelief out of their victim. Everyone's goal is the same: drive Perry nuts. It's like The Truman Show, if Christof made no effort to be convincing. But Perry is so used to the idiotic antics of his best friends -- they've been at this for over a decade -- that, no matter how outlandish their behaviour, Perry never doubts the credibility of the world around him. A few random facts about Perry: he's lactose intolerant, he burps constantly, and he desperately wants to have sex with Tammy Faye Baker.

Since most of the incidents in this movie are way too elaborate to explain here -- everyone involved takes great joy in inventing ridiculously outlandish situations to put Perry through -- let me explain one brief incident. In one scene, Perry is asked to pour beer, pizza, raw eggs, Chinese food, and a bagel into a blender and drink the resulting concoction in its entirety, all in one long take. After Perry endures this once and almost throws up, the director of the the movie and the movie-within-the-movie (both of which are called Windy City Heat), Bobcat Goldthwait, asks him to do another take. This is one of the most innocent incidents in the film but, like the rest, it's hysterical because of Perry's utterly unpredictable response.

The filmmakers constantly rub in how clueless Perry is, giving various crew members names like Roman Polanski (on the commentary, Perry says he wrote a book report on Polanski in grade school and knew this wasn't the real deal), Travis Bickle, John Quincy Adams, Hiroshima Nagasaki, John Quincy Adams, and Frances Farmer, not to mention the mind-blowing fake Charlton Heston who makes two hysterical appearances. But the genius of this movie is that we never see behind-the-curtain, as we normally would on a prank TV show. Although we get a text explanation of the prank up front, the whole movie is relayed from Perry's point-of-view.

When an entire film is devoted to documenting the thoughts of one man, chances are the filmmakers respect that man or, at the very least, the subject knows where he stands in relation to the film he's appearing in. What's fascinating here is that Perry has no idea what's going on. Every interview clip has an underlying tension between what the subject knows and what the audience knows. Whereas Perry thinks he's a major star and displays all kinds of ego as a result, the audience knows that he's a nobody and the butt of all the jokes. The divide between Perry's perception of himself and the audience's perception of him is so great that uncontrollable comic gold can't help but pour out of every scene.

The other great strength of this film is the hilarious way in which the phony production re-imagines every known rule of filmmaking, etiquette, and Hollywood cause-and-effect. Perry has been inserted into a fictional world where nothing makes sense and he seems oddly comfortable (like this is just the way Hollywood works), no matter how many times he is reduced to straightjacket-level temper tantrums. On one level, this is absurdist humor at its most over-the-top, but on another level this is straight-up satire, using this unsuspecting subject as a tool to examine the excesses of both Hollywood and those willing to do anything for fame. The strange thing is, while these manufactured scenarios are deliberately unrealistic, I wouldn't be surprised if many of these incidents have played out in real productions (by Troma, presumably).

The criticism of Windy City Heat tends to focus on the exploitative nature of the comedy, but what's really fascinating is an angle that's all-too-often ignored by critics: exploitation or not, this is Perry's reality. After all, this practical joke has been ongoing for over a decade. When a prank lasts that long, it becomes your reality and, as insane as this experiment is, it actually touches Perry in a meaningful way. In fact, in an extra feature where he watches the (real) film for the first time, Perry is brought to tears (of pride) and embraces the madmen buddies who orchestrated the whole mess. He cries at the same point in the video commentary.

It's also worth noting that Perry has come closer to realizing his goal of cinematic fame, if not fortune, through this project than any other (which reminds me, his resume is quite bizarre... and impressive). He didn't get there through smarts and careful planning, but he's not wired for that kind of success. Yes, he's exploited, but he's exploited in the interest of fulfilling his own goals and, while he doesn't seem to understand that he's the punchline of his own "success" story, he's obviously pleased with the result.

As you surf the net and go through the extras on this disc, the reality becomes a bit more clear. The reason so many ridiculous "characters" (rather than people) show up in this non-fiction film -- ie. a porno producer who has a long-standing feud with Perry -- is because Perry's friends have literally written their friend's whole life over the course of many years. This goes way beyond Windy City Heat. In fact, Perry's whole life is like a low budget Truman Show that manages to stay afloat solely because a) Perry is too naive to figure it out or b) he's the kind of guy who would rather be a fictional character and live a fantasy than be a real person and accept the limitations of reality.

Even after watching all the features on this DVD, one big question remains: was Perry mad when he realized that the movie-within-the-movie was not a real movie? As it turns out, the prank isn't over and Perry still doesn't know what really happened. In an issue of Vice magazine, his friend Don explains this: "We took him out for dinner and told him there were some problems. We said the funder, Hiroshima Nagasaki, didn't like the 'actual' movie and he wanted to do a behind-the-scenes thing. Once Perry was okay with that idea, we told him that also, Mr. Nagasaki is a big fan of Punk'd and The Jamie Kennedy Experiment and wanted it to look like a prank."

I guess it's possible that Perry is in-on-the-joke, but I don't believe it. And if he is, that's beside the point. The movie is fascinating because it uses hysterical low brow humor to create a genuinely dense and complex, post-modern portrait of the cinematic process and one man's deranged appetite for fame. It's kind of like a nonconsensual, psychological Jackass. And believe it or not, that's a good thing. -- Jonathan Doyle